A French Director Ripe for Rediscovery

By

Kristin M. Jones

November 23, 2011

Stylistically daring, rigorously suspenseful, rife with black humor and themes of betrayal, decay and shifting morality, the films of Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977) have been hugely influential yet have endured controversy and critical neglect, partly because the guilt and malaise they capture reflect the aftereffects of a grim period in French history. Many of his films remain little known stateside, but his dark vision, rich with indelible performances by wonderful French actors, is ripe for rediscovery.

A Clouzot retrospective opening Saturday in Cambridge, Mass., next month in New York, and later traveling to the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Calif., offers a chance to explore his oeuvre. The series was co-curated by Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive, and MoMA associate curator Joshua Siegel. Reached by phone, Mr. Siegel said that while Clouzot's work has long merited rediscovery, one impetus was Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's 2010 documentary about "L'Enfer," an unfinished Clouzot film with dazzling color effects. "With the success of Bromberg and Medrea's 'Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno,' and the revelation of 'L'Enfer,' we saw an opportunity to restore Clouzot's reputation."

Clouzot began as a screenwriter and assistant director. Inspired by the movies of Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, he summoned a similar moody atmosphere, as well as vivid characters, in screenplays he wrote for other directors and for his own policiers. His debut feature, "The Assassin Lives at Number 21" ("L'Assassin habite au 21," 1942), is a crackling whodunit that opens with a shot from a killer's point of view and combines "Thin Man"–style wit with an array of grotesque suspects. Clouzot's greatest foray into the genre was the glittering noir "Quai des Orfèvres" (1947)—set in rain-slicked streets, seedy music halls and the eponymous Paris police station—in which three people, none evil but all capable of committing the crime, separately visit the home of a sleazy rich man on the night of his murder and then scramble to escape a colorful detective (Louis Jouvet) and their own obsessions.

ENLARGE

Clouzot captured the guilt and malaise of a grim period in his country's history. Above, a scene from 'The Wages of Fear.'
Harvard Film Archive

Subtle yet merciless, Clouzot's wartime masterpiece "The Raven" ("Le corbeau," 1943) attracted a flood of controversy that stained his career. Made for the Nazi-funded Continental Films, it fell under attack from both the right and the left. Based on a real-life incident involving poison-pen letters, it depicts an entire town becoming infected by malice. After the war Clouzot was banned from filmmaking for a time. "It had more to do with the fact that he held up a mirror to their own sense of guilt and cowardice than it did with any unseemly associations," Mr. Siegel said.

And then the French New Wave swept in and its auteurs were disdainful of Clouzot and other filmmakers of his generation, dismissing his work as insufficiently experimental. But "Le corbeau" still was a touchstone for the young François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol has drawn on Clouzot's mordant critiques of bourgeois society.

Alfred Hitchcock borrowed from Clouzot's chillingly manipulative "Diabolique" ("Les Diaboliques," 1955) when he made "Psycho" (1960), although Clouzot's steady ooze of dread is all his own. "Diabolique" follows a fragile woman (played by Clouzot's wife, Véra) who tries to murder her abusive headmaster husband with the aid of his mistress (Simone Signoret). The French director's experience in a sanatorium contributed to the claustrophobic setting, an isolated school alongside a fetid swimming pool. He typically elicited intense performances, even requiring that actors eat rotten fish for a scene in "Diabolique." His existential thriller "The Wages of Fear" ("Le salaire de la peur," 1953), about a quartet of underemployed men in Brazil hired to transport nitroglycerin, also contains moments of shiver-inducing realism.

The series includes intriguing rarities, such as "Jean's Return" ("Le retour de Jean"), Clouzot's harrowing contribution to the omnibus film "Return to Life" ("Retour à la vie," 1949), in which a concentration-camp survivor hides, interrogates and tortures a Nazi war criminal. Mr. Siegel is especially enthusiastic about "Manon" (1948), an adaptation of l'Abbé Prévost's novel "Manon Lescaut." The childishly amoral femme fatale (Cécile Aubry) loves but continually betrays a Resistance fighter in cash-strapped postwar France, until their story ends in a surreal desert-set finale. "It becomes this very ambiguous portrait of the legacy of the war," Mr. Siegel said. "It's a wonderful case of taking an 18th-century novel and turning it into something that seems unsettling and complex and relevant."

Vibrating with color and strikingly contemporary, Clouzot's final film, "Woman in Chains" ("La Prisonnière," 1968), about a woman's entanglement with a voyeur, uses Op and Kinetic art to convey her profound anxiety. Mr. Siegel said, "Throughout his career he was interested in psychological torment. . . . And the utter cruelty and sardonic humor that pervades all of these films is, of course, quite relevant to the work of filmmakers like Michael Haneke, Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick." Clouzot's legacy is undeniable—a master storyteller, he was also bracingly unafraid to expose the shadows within us.

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